[Illustration: THE TEMPTATION OF THE CLAY]
I
Some men grow away from places, others grow into them: It is a curious
and delicate matter. Before now, a man has been thrown out by his own
property, yet his successor made immediately at home there. Once let
Imagination dwell upon this psychology of places and it will travel
very far. Here lies a great mystery, entangled with the mystery of life
itself, delicately baited, too. Only the utterly obtuse, one thinks,
can ignore the hint offered by Nature--that there is this very definite
relationship existing between places and human beings, and that the
aggressive attitude is not always chiefly upon the side of the latter.
So it is that there are spots of country--mere bits of scenery, a
valley, plain, or river bank, estate or even garden--that undeniably
bid a man stay, and welcome; or for no ascertainable reason reject
him, and make him anxious to leave. Campers, looking for a night’s
resting-place, know this well; and so may owners of estates and
houses,--campers on a larger scale, seeking to settle somewhere for the
few years of a life-time. Neither one nor other, however, one thinks,
unless he be a swift-minded poet with vivid divination, gets quite to
the root of the matter.
Very suggestive are the mysterious processes by which such results
are sometimes brought about, a certain pathos in them too. For the
rejected owner is usually of that hard intellectual type that is
utterly insensible to the fairy flails of Beauty, and seeks, therefore,
in vain through all his stores of logic for a reasonable cause and
effect; whereas the accepted one, exquisitely adjusted though he may
be to the seduction of the place that takes him in, yet is unable to
tell in words what really happens, or to express a tithe of that sweet
marvellous explanation that lies concealed within his heart. The one
denies it, the other makes wild, poetic guesses; but neither really
knows.
Dick Eliot understood something of the two points of view perhaps,
because he experienced both acceptance and rejection; and this story,
of how a place first welcomed him, then violently tossed him out
again, is as queer a case of such relationship as one may ever hear.
But, then, Dick Eliot combined in himself a measure of both types
of mind; he was intellectual, and knew that two and two make four,
but he was also mystical, and knew that they make five or nothing,
or a million--that everything is One, and One is everything. Neither
was, perhaps, very strong in him, because life had not provided the
opportunity for one or other’s exclusive development; but both existed
side by side in his general mental composition. And they resulted
in a level so delicately poised that the apparent balance yet had
instability at its roots.
* * * * *
Leaving England at twenty-two or three--there were misunderstandings
with his University, where in classics and philosophy he had promised
well; with his step-parents who regarded him as well lost; and in a
sense, that yet did not affect his honour, with his country’s law--he
had since met life in difficult, rough places. He had lived. All manner
of experiences had been his; he had known starvation in strange cities,
and had more than once been close to death--queer kinds of death. But,
also, he had been close to earth, and the earth had wonderfully taught
him. The results of this teaching, not recognised at the time, came out
later to puzzle and amaze him. For years he dwelt in the wilderness
with life reduced to its essentials--the big, crude, thundering facts
of it--so that he had come to regard scholarship, once so valued, as
over-rated, and action as the sole reality. The poetic, mystical side
of him passed into temporary abeyance. Worldly achievement and ambition
led him. This, however, was a mood of youth only, a reaction due to the
resentment of his exile, and to the grievance he cherished against the
academic conventions--so he deemed them--that had cut him off from his
inheritance.
At thirty, or thereabouts, he fell in love and married--a vigorous
personality of a woman with Red Indian in her blood, picked up in
some wild escapade along the frontiers of Arizona and New Mexico;
and, within six months of marriage, the death of an aunt had left him
unexpected master of this little gem of an estate in the south of
England where the following experience took place.
This impulsive action of an aunt whom he had seen but once, due to
her wish to spite the other claimants rather than to any pretended
love for himself, resulted in a radical change of life. He came home,
ignored by his relations, and ignoring them in turn. The former love
of books revived; the imaginative point of view re-asserted itself;
he saw life from another angle. Action, after all, was but a part of
it, another form of play. The mental life was the reality; he studied,
meditated, wrote. Once more the deep, poetic mystery of things lit all
his thoughts with wonder. Corrected by the hard experiences of his
early years, the philosopher and dreamer in him assumed the upper hand,
though the speculative dreams he indulged were more sanely regulated
than before. The imagination was now more finely tempered.
To look at, he was sometimes obviously forty-five, yet at others could
easily have passed for thirty:--a tall, lean figure of a man; spare,
as though the wilderness had taken that toll of him which no amount of
subsequent easy living could efface. To see him was to think of men
toiling in a hard, stern land where all things had to be conquered
and nothing yielded of itself, where, moreover, human life was cheap
and of small account. He was alert, always in training, cheeks thin,
neck sinewy, knees ready instantly to turn a horse by grip alone, the
reins unnecessary so that both hands were free to fight. The eyes were
keen and dark, moustache clipped very short and partly grizzled; deep
furrows marked the jaw and forehead; but the muscular hands were young,
the fling of the shoulders young, the toss and set of the big head
young as well. And he always dressed in riding breeches, with a strap
about the waist instead of braces. You might see him hitch them up as
he stepped back to leap the stream, or to take the pine knolls with a
run downhill.
Indeed, the imaginative side of him seemed almost incongruous; and that
such a figure could conceal a mystical, tenderly poetic side not one
man in a thousand need have guessed. But, in spite of these severer
traits, the character, you felt, was tender enough upon its under
side. It was merely that the control of the body and emotions acquired
in the wilds had never been unlearned, and that no amount of softer
living could let it be forgotten.
About the rather grim and over-silent mouth, for instance, there were
marks like the touches of a flower that sometimes made the sternness
seem a clumsy mask. An intuitive woman, or a child, must have found him
out at once.